TileMapCreator – Update 01

As promised here comes a small update on the TileMapCreator; screenshot first:

So this must seem disappointing, nothing really changed, except maybe the gray square on the grid. But then again I’ll have to remind you that TMC is far from being useable and the biggest changes will happen in the codebase which then again don’t necessarily need to be visually present in the application. What did then change?

In the old version I just had one class Grid which handled all the selecting and highlighting decisions next to the rendering part. This ‘method’ got quickly out of hand and there was no useable way to keep track of every cell and its states. But if one ‘object’ has different states why would I want to try really hard to synchronize different vectors? Why not just use another class? So I introduced the new class Cell for which exist just one header file. One cell keeps track of the states highlighted, selected, changed and filled. Additionally if also hold a shared_ptr to the texture or nullptr if the cell doesn’t hold a tile.

For the grid rendering I also thought about for quite a bit, actually it was the first part I changed, and I’ve chosen the following render steps.

for each cell
if the cell has changed
draw the blank sprite to clear the cell
if the cell is filled
draw tile
if the cell is selected
draw selector
if the cell is highlighted
draw highlighter
draw the grid overlay
if one cell has changed
update the grid texture

This assumes an iteration over all cells doesn’t cost much time. Also I always clear the cell because it’s possible that the tile as some transparent pixels, rendering it on old content would produce a wrong image. This seems to work quite well.

Another approach I could think of would be using multiple render textures for different layers and then combine them at the end. But I don’t really see how it would make a difference in performance and it would probably only increase the GPU memory usage.

As you can see in the screenshot the highlighting already works (again). When ever your mouse cursor hovers over a cell it will get highlighted once and when you leave it, it will get ‘unhighlighted’ and the next cell will get highlighted.

Next up will be selection. For that I’ll have to store the selected cells in a vector or a similar data structure, to tell the grid which should be shown as selected and later to tell the events like delete or place where to work their magic.